CityLab | Gabriel Metcalfhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/gabriel-metcalf/2015-12-22T16:48:35-05:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p>I moved to San Francisco for its radical politics. Lots of people did, for generations. Maybe it was like moving to Los Angeles if you longed to be a movie star: If you wanted to be part of the grand project of reconstructing the American Left in the petri dish of a single city, San Francisco beckoned.</p><p>The quirky, counter-cultural San Francisco so many of us fell in love with is almost gone now, <a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/7205/?utm_source=feed">destroyed by high housing costs</a>. We’ve lost not only the politics, but all kinds of cultural experimentation that just doesn’t thrive in places that are expensive.</p><p>We are watching the old San Francisco slip away before our eyes. Every time a housing unit becomes vacant, it goes on the market at a price so high that no organizer, writer, teacher, activist or artist could dream of affording it. Trying things that don’t have monetary potential just isn’t possible anymore.</p><p>How did we get here?</p><p>There are lots of reasons San Francisco became so progressive in the first place. The city had a radical labor movement going back to the 19th century. It nurtured a literary and artistic bohemia. It was tolerant of kooks and outcasts. Its various racial and ethnic groups figured out how to get along. In the 1970s, the embrace of identity politics grew to incorporate gays and lesbians, and the city reveled in its diversity, with groups claiming distinct neighborhoods as their own in a modern twist on the tradition of ethnic urban enclaves.</p><p>At its apex, progressive San Francisco accomplished amazing things. It invented new models of delivering affordable housing and health care. It invested deeply in public space, from parks to bike lanes. It adopted a transit-first policy. It pioneered all kinds of equal rights for the LGBTQ community. It did its best to create a high-tax, high-service public sector that could generate the funds to provide a more generous social safety net, at a time when the national government was moving in the other direction. At times, it felt like San Francisco was working toward a form of social democracy in one city, proving to the rest of the country that a more European-style economic model could thrive within the confines of the United States.</p><p>It was also a haven for people from all over the world: Refugees from Central American wars, migrants from Asia and Latin America in search of a better life, gays and lesbians from across the country. A large chunk of the population moved here as adults; San Francisco was a consciously chosen destination.</p><p>But progressive San Francisco had a fatal, Shakespearean flaw that would prove to be its undoing: It decided early on to be against new buildings. It decided that new development, with the exception of publicly subsidized affordable housing, was not welcome.</p><p>At the outset, let’s say the late 1960s, this stance seemed logical, even urgent. The previous era of city building had brought terrible projects of urban destruction: bulldozing black neighborhoods, ramming freeways through cities, building foreboding public housing towers. Across the country the movement to roll back modernist urban planning took on a preservationist bent: Since the bad guys were trying to destroy the city, the good guys needed to defend it from change.</p><p>But somewhere between 1970 and 2000, the context changed. It was, in fact, <a href="http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/05/how-and-why-american-cities-are-coming-back/2015/?utm_source=feed">one of the most profound cultural and demographic shifts in American history</a>: after years of suburban migration, people started moving to cities again.</p><p>For decades, starting in the mid-1940s, virtually every major city in America lost population as families moved to the suburbs. For all the reasons we know so well—racism and white flight, the attempt to escape the influence of organized labor, or simply the desire for more space and the lure of single-family home ownership—both jobs and people moved out of central cities into the suburban periphery. Disinvestment was the defining urban problem which generations of liberal activists and politicians tried to solve.</p><p>But starting around 1980, New York and San Francisco, along with many other cities, began to grow in population again. This was not predicted or expected by most urban theorists of the time, but it was dramatic, and it has continued. Between 1980 and 2014, Boston grew by 16 percent, New York by 20 percent, San Francisco by 23 percent and Seattle by 35 percent. Denver started its turnaround later, but follows the same pattern.</p><h3><strong>After Decades of Decline, Some U.S. Cities Saw Population Growth</strong></h3><figure><img alt="" class="bordered" height="489" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/07/GrowthCities/133d4d888.png" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">This graph shows the change in city population relative to the base year of 1940.<br>
(SOURCE: SPUR analysis drawn from U.S. Census data.)</figcaption></figure><p>Not all cities have turned around their population losses. Many of the places that are called “Rust Belt” cities have continued to shrink.</p><h3><strong>Not All U.S. Cities Have Affordability Challenges</strong></h3><figure><img alt="" height="370" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/07/CitiesDecline/363b44ac7.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">This graph shows the change in city population relative to the base year of 1940.<br>
(SOURCE: SPUR analysis drawn from U.S. Census data.)</figcaption></figure><p>But for cities like San Francisco that now have 35 years of growth behind them, the urban problems of today are utterly different from what they were a generation or two ago. Instead of disinvestment, blight and stagnation, we are dealing with the problems of rapid change and the stresses of growth: congestion and, most especially, high housing costs.</p><p><a href="https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/yes-supply-demand-apply-to-housing-even-in-san-francisco-193c1b0c190f">When more people want to live in a city, it drives up the cost of housing</a>—unless a commensurate amount of places to live are added. By the early 1990s it was clear that San Francisco had a fateful choice to make: Reverse course on its development attitudes, or watch America’s rekindled desire for city life overwhelm the openness and diversity that had made the city so special.</p><p>When San Francisco should have been building at least 5,000 new housing units a year to deal with the growing demand to live here, it instead averaged only about 1,500 a year over the course of several decades. In a world where we have the ability to control the supply of housing locally, but people still have the freedom to move where they want, all of this has played out in predictable ways.</p><p>Many cities faced the same set of dilemmas. But San Francisco’s challenge has been harder for the reason that our regional economy has been so strong. Regardless of what happened inside the city limits, we have had the most powerful engine of job creation in the country just a half hour to the south (a commute time that increases with economic growth). Over time, many of Silicon Valley’s workers have come to call San Francisco home. Moreover, in contrast to New York, San Francisco does not have a massive network of regional public transit connecting hundreds of different high-density, walkable communities to the city. In fact, neighborhoods that foster urban life and convenience are tremendously scarce in the Bay Area. All of this means the pressure on San Francisco has proven to be even greater than other cities in the country.</p><p>Regardless of these realities, most San Francisco progressives chose to stick with their familiar stance of opposing new development, positioning themselves as defenders of the city’s physical character. Instead of forming a pro-growth coalition with business and labor, most of the San Francisco Left made an enduring alliance with home-owning NIMBYs. It became one of the peculiar features of San Francisco that exclusionary housing politics got labeled “progressive.” (Organized labor remained a major political force throughout this time period, and has allied with both pro-growth and anti-growth forces, depending on the issue.) Over the years, these anti-development sentiments were translated into restrictive zoning, the most cumbersome planning and building approval process in the country, and all kinds of laws and rules that make it <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/02/so-you-want-to-fix-the-housing-crisis/">uniquely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to add housing in San Francisco</a>.</p><figure><img alt="" height="413" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/07/RTR3Z4II/49affc749.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">A real state sign is seen near a row of homes in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco. (REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)</figcaption></figure><p>It’s our own version of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X"><em>What’s the Matter With Kansas?</em></a>—the 2005 book in which Thomas Frank tries to explain how working-class Americans came to vote for right wing politicians against their own economic self-interest. In San Francisco’s case, many tenants came to vote against new development in an attempt to show their disdain for monied interests. The problem is that this stance happens to result in very expensive rents in the long run.</p><p>As the city got more and more expensive, progressive housing policy shifted gradually to a sad, rearguard movement to protect the people already here from being displaced. No longer would San Francisco even try to remain open as a refuge for immigrants and radicals from around the world. The San Francisco Left could never come to terms with its central contradiction of being against the creation of more “places” that would give new people the chance to live in the city. Once San Francisco was no longer open to freaks and dissidents, immigrants and refugees, because it was deemed to be “full,” it could no longer fulfill its progressive values, could no longer do anything for the people who weren’t already here.</p><p>San Francisco will most likely stay liberal for a long time. The richest cities in the United States—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C.—vote blue, just like San Francisco does. The tolerant culture of city life finds more affinity with the Democratic Party. But this city once had the ambition to be more than that. It wanted to push the envelope beyond anything that had been achieved in this country, to embrace ideas that would be politically impossible anywhere else.</p><p>Observers from around the country shake their heads at San Francisco’s approach to housing. But no one made San Francisco the most expensive place in the country on purpose. That’s the tragedy. It was simply the unintended consequence of so many people wanting to live here, coupled with local policies that made it impossible for the amount of housing to grow enough to absorb the demand.</p><p>We’ll never know what would have happened if we had acted in the 1980s or 1990s, or even the 2000s, to change course—if we’d realized that our 1970s land use policies were turning San Francisco into a gated city that made it increasingly closed to newcomers.</p><p>Let me say very clearly here that making it possible to add large amounts of housing supply in San Francisco would never have been enough by itself. A comprehensive agenda for affordability requires additional investments in subsidies for affordable housing. Given the realities of economic inequality, there are large numbers of people who would never be able to afford market-rate housing here, even in a better-functioning market. [See SPUR’s <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/article/2014-02-11/how-make-san-francisco-affordable-again">complete set of ideas to make San Francisco more affordable</a>.] In addition, while my focus here has been on San Francisco’s own housing politics, many smaller Bay Area cities and towns have been even worse actors. A regional solution, in which all cities do their part to accommodate regional population growth, would be far more effective than trying to solve our affordability problems inside the boundaries of a handful of cities. But San Francisco has been part of the problem too, when it could have been a very big part of the solution. Our suburban communities never claimed to be progressive, never wanted to be a refuge for people from all over the world seeking cultural tolerance or an opportunity for a better life.</p><p>Soon after arriving here twenty years ago, I realized that my own politics did not match those of most San Francisco progressives. But I still have a lot of sympathy for many of their aims. I don’t think it’s fair to accuse anti-growth politics in San Francisco of being just a screen for homeowner interests. (Although I have certainly had neighborhood activists proudly tell me they oppose development in order to maintain the high values of their homes). I think the progressive anti-growth sentiment is earnest; it’s people honestly trying to protect their city from unwanted change. It just happens to have backfired.</p><p>I know that the San Francisco I came here for was only a brief moment in the life of the city, and I know that cities are always changing. I also know that something new is emerging, and I plan to be here to find out what it is. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new hybrid culture, drawing on aspects of the city’s earlier radicalism and a youth culture focused on business innovation—a fusion of the counter culture and Silicon Valley.</p><p>I see both ambition and idealism in the new generation, and it’s very possible that the culture being created in San Francisco today is going to be great, too. But this new version of San Francisco needs a revived reform agenda that grapples with the realities of now: a generational reinvestment in public transit, to make up for decades of under-investment in regional mobility; the introduction of widely available ladders of economic advancement that will enable more people to participate in our incredible economy; and more than anything, an embrace of new building within the city. Let’s celebrate the heritage of San Francisco’s progressive tradition. But let’s learn from our past mistakes.</p>Gabriel Metcalfhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/gabriel-metcalf/?utm_source=feedkropic1 / Shutterstock.comWhat's the Matter With San Francisco? 2015-07-23T16:59:24-04:002015-12-22T16:48:35-05:00tag:citylab.com,2015:209-399506The city&rsquo;s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain&mdash;its famed progressive politics.<p>My city, San Francisco, is in the midst of an affordability crisis. People here are angry and afraid. The skyrocketing cost of housing comes up in seemingly every conversation and dominates local news and local politics.</p><p>The <a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/7205/?utm_source=feed">recent piece</a> on San Francisco's housing crisis I wrote for <em>The Atlantic Cities</em> seemed to hit a nerve. But it was mostly devoted to describing how the city got to be a place with the highest housing costs in the country. Now, I want to turn to what we can actually do about it.</p><p>We face a complex problem. It has roots in income inequality, a national issue, as well as regional anti-growth attitudes that extend well beyond the city boundaries. But at the city level, there are a surprising number of things we can definitely do.</p><p><strong>Protect existing rent-controlled housing units</strong></p><p>San Francisco has roughly 172,000 units of rent-controlled housing. Rent control is the city's core tenant protection, allowing many people to stay here. The first thing the city needs to do is to <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-politicians-Restrict-Ellis-Act-evictions-4981974.php">make sure we don't lose those units</a>.</p><p>As housing prices go up, there is ever more incentive for owners of rental units to find a way to get out of the landlord business and sell. One of the most often abused mechanisms is California’s <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/11/07/117540/Priced-Out-Ellis-Act-San-Francisco-eviction">Ellis Act</a>, a state law that says that landlords have the unconditional right to evict tenants to "go out of business."</p><p>Tenant groups in San Francisco have developed a <a href="http://timssanfrancisco.blogspot.com/2013/10/tenants-agenda-will-dominate-local.html">set of proposals</a> to make it more difficult for landlords to use the Ellis Act as a tool to evict people. One of the proposed reforms that seems to make sense is to discourage the practice of buying rent-controlled units for the purpose of converting to Tenancy-in-common units (TICs) or condos by requiring landlords to have been in the landlord business for some set period of time before using the Ellis Act to “leave the business.”</p><p>There is a social compact in San Francisco that needs to be upheld: rent-controlled units should stay under rent control, while ownership opportunities should come from new construction.</p><p><strong>Reinvest in San Francisco’s public housing stock</strong></p><p>The San Francisco Housing Authority has 6,300 units of public housing and roughly 9,000 Section 8 vouchers (which help subsidize rents for low-income tenants). The city is in the process of compiling a broad <a href="http://www.sfgsa.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=10842">public housing reform plan</a> to better manage this housing stock and provide resources to upgrade many of its public housing buildings.</p><figure><img alt="" height="192" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/01/17/1600%20Market.jpeg" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">1600 Market is a below market rate project. (Courtesy <a href="http://brianspiersdevelopment.com/1600Market.html">Brian Spiers Development</a>).</figcaption></figure><p>At the same time, the city is also working on an ambitious program to rehabilitate its most troubled public housing units as part of a program called <a href="http://hope-sf.org/basic.php">HOPE SF</a>. Through Hope SF, the city government is seeking to build in a comprehensive set of social services to give residents the resources to get out of poverty. San Francisco has started this process by identifying the highest-need public housing developments (such as those at Sunnydale and Potrero Terrace), pairing them with project sponsor teams, but much of the funding for both the redevelopment and the resident services still needs to be identified.</p><p>HOPE SF and the broader set of public housing renovations offer an opportunity to physically knit public housing back into the fabric of the city. But most importantly, it means we can keep all those affordable units habitable.</p><p><strong>Double the amount of subsidized affordable housing</strong></p><p>San Francisco has about 16,000 units of "affordable" rental housing (not including public housing), most owned by non-profits. We need to build more.</p><p>Building housing is expensive. The <a href="http://markasaurus.com/2013/10/22/why-can%E2%80%99t-developers-build-housing-in-san-francisco-for-the-people-who-need-it-most-instead-of-for-the-rich/">construction cost of affordable housing</a> units is the same as market rate units. But because they are subsidized, the prices paid by residents are reduced. The average subsidy per unit in San Francisco is around $250,000.</p><p>The roughly 16,000 units the city has today were built over a period of four decades—a long-term social housing program of which San Francisco should be proud. But given the wealth of San Francisco and the enormous problem we are having with housing affordability, I would suggest we adopt a long-term goal of doubling the current supply of subsidized affordable housing.</p><p>In 2012, San Francisco voters passed the <a href="http://www.propc2012.org/about.php">Affordable Housing Trust Fund</a>, which will ultimately set aside around $50 million from the city budget each year for affordable housing construction. If we can get the state of California to create a new affordable housing program, or create one regionally ourselves, we can make our local funding go further.</p><figure><img alt="" height="504" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/01/17/timthumb.jpg" width="520"><figcaption class="caption">This green infill project located in the heart of SoMa will provide 160 units of efficiently designed studios and suites (including micro units). (Courtesy Panoramic Interests).</figcaption></figure><p>But given the uncertainty of committed state and regional funding sources, it’s also time for the city to make a couple of targeted investments with local money. We are experiencing extraordinary growth in the city budget right now, as a result of the boom. San Francisco’s revenues for fiscal year 2013-14 are projected to be $700 million larger than the previous year. The city should consider some one-time allocations from our budget for the next couple of years aimed at having a direct impact on affordability. This money could be spent on helping to rebuild the public housing mentioned above, or it could be spent helping to buy existing buildings and make more units affordable to low-income tenants.</p><p>Doubling the amount of permanently affordable housing is an expensive prospect, but we have a base to work from: thousands of affordable projects in the development pipeline, significant funding already in place and lots of affordable housing developers who know how to produce and manage these units.</p><p><strong>Add supply at all levels</strong></p><p>We got into this housing crisis because we don’t have enough places to live in San Francisco to meet the demand.</p><figure><img alt="" height="400" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/01/16/RTR31W9V.jpg" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">A cyclist rides adjacent to a vacant plot of land in San Francisco. Development rules make it difficult to add new housing stock to the city. (Robert Galbraith/Reuters)</figcaption></figure><p>If we want to keep the city a place where all types of people can afford to live, we must remove obstacles to adding housing. We've seen the social consequences of what happens when we don't. Our best guess is that if we added 5,000 units a year for a sustained period of time, prices would stabilize. While San Francisco has produced just 1,500 units a year over the past two decades, Seattle has averaged 3,000, adding them in a way that has improved the vitality of its downtown and kept prices from rising as drastically. The <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-to-make-SF-housing-more-affordable-4590271.php)">lesson</a> is clear: making it easier to add housing supply keeps rents lower than making it hard to add supply.</p><p>We can get to more supply and more affordability through two types of reforms. First, we need to <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/spur-report/2006-06-01/zoning-more-housing">create more "zoned capacity"</a> in the city where the law allows housing to be added. The city usually does this by conducting neighborhood planning processes, in order to be precise about where to allow development and where not to. In fact, San Francisco has a great <a href="http://sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1699">model</a> for how to do the kind of planning that is community driven and strengthens neighborhoods. (The <a href="http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1713">Market-Octavia Plan</a> and the <a href="http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1665">Rincon Hill Plan</a> are two good examples). We just need to do more of it.</p><p>Second, we need to make it easier to actually build buildings that conform to the zoning rules we've decided on. In many American cities, permits are issued by city staffers who merely check to make sure that a building conforms to the community’s zoning rules. But in San Francisco, even after we’ve done the work of figuring out our zoning rules, buildings that fit them are routinely rejected, shrunk or delayed by years of process. We need to make our own plans count, by making it much, much easier to get permission to build according to zoning.</p><p><strong>Launch a wave of experiments to produce middle-income housing</strong></p><p>The first three proposals are ones that could work at scale, but they leave unaddressed the thing everyone seems to be wishing for: middle income housing that's more affordable than what the market produces today, but which doesn't require subsidies.</p><p>I am not sure that such a wish can be fulfilled, but there are some strategies worth trying. It’s time to experiment.</p><p>One strategy falls into the category of reducing the actual hard construction cost of new housing. This generally means building units that are <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/spur-report/2007-11-20/affordable-design">affordable by design</a>, with less space or with fewer amenities than standard housing. That could mean creating <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Micro-apartment-developments-on-rise-in-S-F-4951775.php">smaller units</a>, encouraging <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/spur-report/2006-06-01/secondary-units">secondary units</a> throughout the city, or building units without parking. All of these ideas are viable, many are in great demand. We should encourage creativity and flexibility in the quest for middle-income options. Maybe we could pick a neighborhood where all new housing is encouraged to be car-free. (In many neighborhoods a majority of households are already choosing to live this way.) And certainly the prohibition on secondary units in most of the city should be repealed.</p><p>Another strategy would be to try to form strategic partnerships with universities to get them to build more <a href="http://www.sfhac.org/positions/student-housing">housing for their students</a> and faculty. These units could be on or off-campus; the point would be to ease some number of students and faculty out of the competition for the rest of the housing supply. </p><p>Another strategy might be to create a new option within the city’s inclusionary housing law, which requires below-market rate units to be paid for by market-rate developments. Perhaps there is a way to experiment with a shallower subsidy for a larger number of units—in essence, spreading the same development subsidy across more people, to see if we can increase the supply of middle-income housing that way.</p><p>Finally, there may be a way for the city government to <a href="http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sf-wise-to-look-to-own-land-to-ease-housing-crisis/Content?oid=2659167">use publicly owned land</a> in new ways. Can the city put surplus land into development for housing, but somehow impose a new kind of price control that ensures it is used for middle-income units? Perhaps there is an adaptation of the land trust model that the city could use for this purpose?</p><p><strong>Use new property taxes from growing neighborhoods to improve those neighborhoods </strong></p><p>At first this final strategy might not sound like it has anything to do with housing affordability, but it does, because it supports conditions in which well-considered development can continue to happen. Right now, certain neighborhoods are growing a lot more than others. If those neighborhoods are going to continue to grow, the current residents need to experience tangible benefits. We need to establish a bargain in which neighborhoods that accept growth can experience an improved neighborhood as part of the deal.</p><p>Of course there are people who will oppose physical change no matter what – even if it's well designed, even if it’s in the right locations, even if it comes with neighborhood improvements. But there are also legitimate concerns from people who care about their neighborhoods. The promise of new development is not just that the new buildings themselves will improve neighborhoods (although if well-designed, they often do), not just that they will provide more customers to support more retail options (although this usually happens), but also that they will provide funding to undertake public improvements in the neighborhood: parks, sidewalk widening, transit improvements, etc. This was implicitly promised in many of the neighborhood plans that were adopted. The city needs to do more to make good on those promises.</p><figure><img alt="" height="475" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/01/14/Screen%20Shot%202014-01-14%20at%204.32.50%20PM.png" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">Rincon Hill. (Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/39276850@N00/2325524395/in/photolist-4xuVoc-4xz7js-4xzh6S-8KE746-53CRk8-5U1YBa-5tua6D-5tywHN-e5xLea-53H4XY-87p8fC-5489Wr-65uvnY-7GHFSs-4XrquT-4XrrsT-4XvG2j-4Xrskt-4XrrEV-4XvF7A-4XvKao-4Xrvm6-4XvMyy-4XrpMX-4XvMad-4XvGkf-4XvFeQ-4XrsFp-4XvNc3-4XvJbA-4XvF19-4XvGX1-4XvHYq-4XrtvB-4XvGb9-4XrpPV-4XvHwj-4Xrs4B-4XvJZm-4Xruqx-4XvFom-4XrpRn-4XrpUK-4XvEXJ-4XvLE7-6A8wKF-nuT8Q-beL4Mt-5zSSu2-53H5Uh-an7y2W">Brad Coy</a>).</figcaption></figure><p>Some of the neighborhoods south of downtown that were planned for highrise development (South Beach, Rincon Hill, and Transbay) are generating hundreds of millions of dollars every year in new property taxes, way above the costs of providing basic public services to those neighborhoods. More of this money should be spent making improvements to the neighborhoods that are generating the revenue.</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>In the long run, the only solution that will actually benefit the vast majority of people is to fix the supply problem. And the hard truth about San Francisco’s housing affordability problem is that most measures we could enact will take years, if not decades, to show results.</p><p>The solutions here have two great virtues: 1) they are legal; and 2) they are capable of being implemented at the city level. They were developed through months of dialogue with housing leaders and city officials, and we are extremely pleased to see that they align with the <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Sneak-peek-Mayor-Ed-Lee-has-a-housing-solution-5151504.php">Mayor’s announced agenda for 2014</a>.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">CityFixer</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="CityFixer image" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/citylab/2014/05/promo_fixer_624x384/hero_tmp.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/?utm_source=feed">Solutions for an Urbanizing World</a></h4>
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<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>It's also important to remember that it's not just San Francisco that needs to build more housing. Every city in the region needs to do its part if we are going to have an impact on housing costs. If other cities of the Bay Area did their part to create more walkable neighborhoods, there would be less gentrification pressure on the few that we do have. As everyone points out, we can't look at this issue just within one city. Oakland, San Jose, and the other cities of the Bay Area are all part of the solution.</p><p>Our work in San Francisco would be much easier if we had support from the national level, both to provide help for a social housing program, and more fundamentally to address income inequality. But as that doesn’t appear to be forthcoming we must take the lead locally. We need things like a <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Ed-Lee-backs-significant-increase-in-minimum-wage-5053183.php">higher city minimum wage</a> (to increase purchasing power at the bottom of the income scale) and a <a href="http://sfcontroller.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=4912">major reinvestment in Muni</a> (to reduce household transportation costs). We may be one of the first cities to experience this problem with huge new demand for city living that requires us to change our approach to affordability, but we certainly won’t be the last.</p><p><em>Top image: Transbay Tower. Image courtesy of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanists/10048688804/">SPUR</a>.</em></p>Gabriel Metcalfhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/gabriel-metcalf/?utm_source=feedSPUR/FlickrIt's Not Too Late to Make San Francisco Affordable Again. Here's How2014-01-20T07:45:00-05:002014-05-15T16:42:16-04:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-362225A pragmatist&#39;s manifesto.<p>
My friends keep moving to Oakland. Gone from San Francisco for greener pastures and cheaper rents, because it’s just gotten too hard, by which I really mean too expensive. Their move signals that something has gone terribly wrong in this most progressive of American cities.</p><p>
In some ways, we came by the problem innocently. San Francisco had the good fortune to be one of the very few 19th century industrial cities to successfully make the transition to a new, post-industrial economic base. It wasn’t just bohemians who set up shop here—all kinds of entrepreneurs and creative business people decided to call San Francisco home. As wave after wave of older industrial jobs moved out of town, new types of work were created to replace them.</p><p>
At the same time, San Francisco was a great place to live. Partly from historical inheritance and partly from the work of activists who chose to make the city the focus of their activism, the city remained a walkable, urban paradise compared to most of America.</p><p>
A great quality of life and a lot of high-paying professional jobs meant that a lot of people wanted to live here. And they still do.</p><p>
But the city did not allow its housing supply to keep up with demand. San Francisco was down-zoned (that is, the density of housing or permitted expansion of construction was reduced) to protect the "character" that people loved. It created the most byzantine planning process of any major city in the country. Many outspoken citizens did—and continue to do—everything possible to fight new high-density development or, as they saw it, protecting the city from undesirable change.</p><p>
Unfortunately, it worked: the city was largely "protected" from change. But in so doing, we put out fire with gasoline. Over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else.</p><p>
Whatever the merits of this strategy might be in terms of preserving the historic fabric of the city, it very clearly accelerated the rise in housing prices. As more people move to the Bay Area, the demand for housing continues to increase far faster than supply.</p><p>
There’s <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francisco-boom-back">a lot of housing under construction now</a>, and for the next couple of years, we’ll see more built. But a few years of strong housing production, building out neighborhood plans that the city has worked on for the last two decades, is going to be too little, too late to undo the larger trend. Absent any transformative approaches, new housing construction is likely to return to its normally low levels after the current round of building is finished.</p><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2013/10/11/RTX1091U.jpg" height="393" width="600"><figcaption>A barista prepares a coffee drink at Sightglass, an upscale coffee bar and roastery in San Francisco. (Robert Galbraith/Reuters)</figcaption></figure><p>
Railing against Google buses, fancy restaurants or new condos—the visible signs of gentrification—will do nothing to stop San Francisco from becoming more expensive. These are not causes of the rising rents; they are symptoms. The root cause is that many people have chosen to live in San Francisco, and we are now all competing with one another to bid up the rents. As long as this remains a desirable place to live in a region that is producing a lot of jobs — while at the same time we fail to produce enough housing to accommodate the demand — then housing prices will continue to rise.</p><p>
San Francisco needs more affordable housing. The problem is, subsidized, below-market-rate units are too expensive to build to help very many people. It costs around $250,000 in government subsidy per unit. You can get a sense of the scale of the cost based on how many people you want to help. Subsidizing affordable homes for 10,000 families comes at a price of tag of $2.5 billion. To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion.</p><p>
So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. But most people will never get to live in one of these units. It is not a strategy that will have an effect on the housing costs for the vast majority of the people trying to make a go of it in San Francisco. If we want to actually make the city affordable for <em>most</em> <em>people</em>—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams, a place a parent can raise kids and not have to spend every minute at work—we have to fix the supply problem.</p><p>
There is room for San Francisco to grow for many more decades. Our estimate is that if we could produce 5,000 units a year for a sustained period of time, that would be enough to make a real impact on affordability. This kind of infill development—if it is well-designed and well-located—would be good not just for housing costs, but also for moving us toward a society that drives less.</p><p>
There may also be some more innovative approaches that are worth experimenting with, to try to create more housing specifically targeted to middle-income households. Perhaps we should pick one neighborhood with great transit where we say, all housing produced here has to be car-free. Perhaps we can get some more neighborhoods to allow micro-units and new secondary units (sometimes called "in-law" units) as "naturally affordable," un-subsidized types of housing. And maybe there are tweaks to the city’s "inclusionary housing" program that can generate more middle-income units.</p><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2013/10/11/shutterstock_2159497.jpg" height="450" width="600"><figcaption>Oakland City Center. (<span><a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-4805p1.html" id="portfolio_link">Lynn Watson</a>/<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock.com</a></span>)</figcaption></figure><p>
The rise in housing costs is having big effects on the broader region as well. We should be thinking about San Francisco in the context of the rest of the urbanized Bay Area as we look for ways to make life more affordable. As people get priced out of their first-choice neighborhoods, they move to new ones, and they in turn make it safe for subsequent waves of gentrifiers. This process has now moved from San Francisco to Oakland, and perhaps other parts of the Bay Area as well.</p><p>
Whether the gentrification process is good or bad for neighborhoods, and for the lower-income people who live there, is something that can be debated endlessly. But what is strikingly different about the Bay Area in contrast to a place like New York is the fact that New York has so many more walkable, pre-war neighborhoods located on rail transit, within easy commuting distance of Manhattan. When New York neighborhoods like Soho and the Village got too expensive, for example, the Lower East Side became a major center for artists and other members of the cultural avant-garde. When the Lower East Side got too expensive, people went across the East River to Williamsburg. Next came Fort Green, Dumbo, Red Hook and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn that were still cheap. But as every spot in Brooklyn with a good rail connection to the city gets more expensive, there still is Queens, the Bronx, Newark, the towns up the Hudson — walkable neighborhoods in every direction.</p><p>
As expensive as Manhattan is, and as far along into the gentrification process as the many surrounding communities are, there are still many places to go within the New York orbit to have an affordable, urban way of life.</p><p>
In the Bay Area, there are far fewer options that fit the criteria of walkable, transit-proximate and affordable. For many of my friends, there is just one: Oakland. This is what people mean when they say <a href="http://sfist.com/2013/07/08/map_the_bay_area_through_a_new_york.php">Oakland is the Brooklyn of the Bay Area</a>. It’s the next stop on the train, <a href="http://www.metropolismag.com/July-August-2013/Oakland-Made/">it’s cool</a>, it’s <a href="http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/2841-why-are-all-my-friends">where young people go now.</a></p><p>
If we were one city, San Francisco could spend some of its incredible wealth on the things Oakland needs, like hiring more cops and teachers, not to mention more transit connections between the two cities. This is not an argument for annexation but a call to think about the answers to our problems from a regional perspective. We can’t solve affordable housing or transit access within the limits of any one city.</p><p>
Oakland is perched in a paradoxical and highly charged position right now, dealing with problems of serious poverty—not enough economic opportunity for its residents, not enough money to cover basic public services—while at the same time facing fears of rising rents and displacement if too many members of the San Francisco exodus move there. In the Oakland neighborhoods that are near BART or have good schools, or both, the housing prices are already climbing quickly.</p><p>
San Francisco can’t do it alone, but it needs to do its part. The three big cities of the region (San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland) have disproportionately more opportunity and more responsibility to absorb a major percentage of the region’s population growth for the simple reason that they have the room and they have the existing transit infrastructure. But smaller cities should be asked to do their part, too. If San Jose succeeded in becoming more urban, and if smaller cities such as Palo Alto and Berkeley were willing to grow more, some of the pressure would be relieved from San Francisco. We need our own "metropolitan" strategy that ties the region together in better ways, and creates walkable, diverse communities in more locations.</p>Gabriel Metcalfhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/gabriel-metcalf/?utm_source=feedReutersThe San Francisco Exodus2013-10-14T09:30:00-04:002013-10-14T13:27:52-04:00tag:citylab.com,2013:209-365989How S.F. became the least affordable city in America, and what we can do about it now.